September 11th, 2001, 9:00 a.m. I’m in a veterinary office in Winchester, Virginia. In two months to the day I’ll be forty – something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as thirty-nine year olds are prone to do. On my lap is Bessie Mae, a three-month-old giant schnauzer mix, an unruly, foolish-looking creature at this age, hard to take seriously, a mass of black curls with a preposterous cartoon tail. She’ll soon grow into as noble a dog as I’ve ever known – large-eyed, gentle, obliging and fearless, my guide and companion into middle age. Fifteen years later, as she lies dying, hemorrhaging on my mother’s front lawn, I’ll be struck with the realization that I’ve failed her, having never offered her either the patience or the affection she deserved. I feel lucky to have made this discovery about myself, it’s helped me be a better friend to dogs and people who’ve come after. But I’ll always be sorry it came too late, and at her expense.
Bessie and I sit waiting in the exam room. The door’s closed. NPR’s “Morning Edition” buzzes inaudibly through the ceiling speakers. I’m in a stock-taking mood. The night before, just past dusk, a man named Duane handed me a check for thirty thousand dollars. In exchange I turned over ownership of all fifteen thousand books in my shop inventory, along with most of my fixtures, a coffee-maker, and the shop cat, a mental stray calico named Georgie. Duane is a comparatively well-to-do bookshop owner from downstate Pennsylvania; his money comes not from books, but from a career in the software industry, from which he’s managed to retire at forty. He represents a certain class of new book dealer that’s begun to enter the trade around this time: not quite dilettantes, they truly like the idea of books. They’re both tech- and business-savvy. They tend to be well-off but not quite wealthy, but they’ve been around big money enough to know what big money looks like. Most of them first encountered the trade as collectors, and they’ve witnessed just enough from the outside to see that, first of all, most booksellers run their businesses as if their hair was on fire; and second of all, that if big money wanted to, it could swallow the entire American rare-book ecosystem in one gulp. Duane’s goal, he tells me, is to buy up as many open shops as he can and consolidate them in one place, under his banner. Unlike them (by which he means me, I suppose) he will run his business like a business. Duane’s a genuinely nice guy and I wish him all the best – he’s giving me thirty thousand dollars after all, which is more than anyone has ever given me before, for anything. I’m not yet confident enough in my own grasp of books, business or life to indulge my suspicion that Duane has somehow missed the point. But in retrospect, I can say that Duane didn’t last very long.
To be clear, I’m feeling no regrets. After five years running an open shop, I’m four years into burnout: bored with bookselling, out of ideas, out of money, and now, out of business. The check from Duane will just cover my last month’s rent, my credit card bills, and my outstanding debts with distributors. It’s not much to show for five years of eighty-hour weeks. But for the moment I’m not counting my failures. The thought of being out of debt and free to wander fills me with a sudden euphoria, a lightness I’d forgotten I could feel. Over the previous few weeks, my regular customers have been giving me lots of grief about my decision to close the shop, which over the years has become a sort of gathering place for Winchester’s disaffected liberals (“all twenty of them,” I’m fond of joking). One has even threatened never to speak to me again. The sudden thought that I might actually never have to hear her voice again fills me with inexpressible joy.
At some point I realize I’ve been waiting longer than usual for the doctor to appear. I strain to listen for sounds of activity outside the closed exam room door, wondering if I’ve been forgotten. As I do, the buzzy speakers come into focus overhead and I hear the voice of Bob Edwards, the greatest radio newsman of his generation and a comfort in dark times. But Bob’s easy Louisville drawl is strained this morning. He’s speaking urgently, a half-pitch higher than usual. Something about a plane, and a building in New York. It may be a private plane. There may be more than one plane, or more than one building. Details are fuzzy. But even through the shitty speakers I can tell Bob knows more than he’s saying. The doctor comes in, finally – she’s a friend of a friend, we call her the Fancy Vet; we can’t really afford her but we stay because her politics are good and she plays NPR in the office and remembers our pets’ names. “Have you been listening to this?,” she asks. “Kind of,” I reply. “It sounds bad.”
By late that afternoon Lee Ann and I have driven ourselves and our animals a few hundred miles south and west, to Monroe County in southern West Virginia, the home of our youth, well away from what in succeeding weeks will come to be called the “Blast Radius” around Washington, D.C. We’re pretty frantic on our way out of town, everyone is frantic, either escaping or hiding. The highways are eerily empty. We’re spooked. However, we don’t neglect to deposit Duane’s check. The banks are closing early; we get there just in time. Whatever euphoria I’d been feeling this morning has by now given way to something else, something indefinable, airborne, communal – too dull to be called rage, too sharp to be called sorrow. As years pass, the intensity of these sentiments will grow, even as their outlines spread and get harder to define. Because of them, my generation will harden, grow brittle, finally splinter into factions driven by fear, resentment, greed, abuse, addiction, surrender. Within a quarter-century our country will turn ungovernable, too diseased even to be at war with itself, a playground for fools and a dangerous place for kind men to live.
But I don’t know any of this yet, and besides, taking stock is an inward, not an outward process. I’m on the cusp of forty. There is a puppy on my lap, that is good. On the other hand, in stark contrast to Duane, retirement is not and probably never will be an option. It’s been about eight years since my last straight job. I have an English degree from a lower-middle tier state university. I’d never tell anyone, but I’ve recently been thinking about applying to pharmacy school – pharmacy school. The dream of a steady paycheck has brought me this close to suicide. But now, it seems, suicide isn’t an option or, like other hollow gestures, even necessary. There is a puppy on my lap. We are lucky who emerge so unscathed.
